You will hear them squeal, the hogs; you will hear them baa, the sheep; you will hear the grinding clank of the chains and see the victims dropping: hogs, half-alive, into the vats of boiling water; the sheep into the range of butchers and carvers who flay them half-alive; while our red representative--yours and mine--stands there, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, that we who are not sheep or hogs and who pay him for his labor may live and be merry and not die. Strange, isn’t it? A gruesome labor. A gruesome picture. We have been flattering ourselves these many centuries that our civilization had somehow got away from this old-time law of life living on death, but here amid all the gauds and refinements of our metropolitan life we find ourselves confronted by it, and here stands our salaried red man who murders our victims for us, while we look on indifferently, or stranger yet, remain blissfully unconscious that the bloody labor is in existence. We live in cities such as this; crowd ourselves in ornamented chambers as much as possible; walk paths from which all painful indications of death have been eliminated, and think ourselves clean and kind and free of the old struggle, and yet behold our salaried agent ever at work; and ever the cry of the destroyed is rising to what heaven we know not, nor to what gods. We dream dreams of universal brotherhood and prate of the era of coming peace, but this slaughter is a stumbling-block over which we may not readily vault. It augurs something besides peace and love in this world. It forms a great commentary on the arrangement of the universe. And yet this revolting picture is not without its relieving feature, though alas! the little softness visible points no way by which the victims may be spared. The very butcher is a human being, a father with little children. One day, after a discouraging hour of this terrible panorama, I walked out into the afternoon sunlight only to brood over the tragedy and terror of it all. This man struck me as a demon, a chill, phlegmatic, animal creature whose horrible eyes would contain no light save that of non-understanding and indifference. Moved by some curious impulse, I made my way to his home--to the sty where I expected to find him groveling--and found instead a little cottage, set about with grass and flowers, and under a large tree a bench. Here was my murderer sitting, here taking his evening’s rest. The sun was going down, the shadows beginning to fall. In the cool of the evening he was taking his ease, a rough, horny-handed man, large and uncouth, but on his knee a child. And such a child--young, not over two years, soft and delicate, with the bloom of babyhood on its cheek and the light of innocence in its eye; and here was this great murderer stroking it gently, the red man touching it softly with his hand.